Album Review: The Band in Heaven- Caught in a Summer Swell
Being an adult sucks. Mortgages. Hours at a job that you may
hate. Losing touch with everyone you thought would always mean something to you
when you were in college. A terrible emptiness inside that will more than
likely never be filled.
The Band in Heaven knows this. They know it all too well,
and they’ve made a record about it.
Caught in a Summer
Swell, aside from borrowing ideas from novels by Ray Bradbury, and diving
headfirst into what it’s like to be stuck in the rut that can be your
mid-to-late 20’s, is an incredible, practically flawless statement of beauty.
The debut full length (!) from Florida’s Band in Heaven, it
finds the former duo, now five-piece, trading in the brash, fuzzed out,
“shitgaze” from their early singles and EPs, for the dreamiest and jangliest
pop that I have heard in recent memory. Pulling from a bevy of influences that
ring back to the 1980’s and 90’s, Caught is
familiar like a conversation with an old friend, but also incredibly original
and exciting.
The ten songs on the album are all tied together by a very
common, cohesive sound, as well as recurring themes that appear in nearly every
track—being young, being dumb, growing old without realizing it, friends fading
away, carefree days you’ve long forgotten, “light” in many forms, the monotony
of adulthood, and the fleeting moments of summer.
That’s heavy, doc.
Caught in a Summer
Swell succeeds because it tackles these ideas with lyrics that are
juxtaposed against primarily upbeat pop songs—here’s where the dreamiest and
jangliest come in. It’s only on the album’s closing track, “Farewell Summer,” does
The Band get as real musically as they do lyrically.
Vocals are handled primarily by guitarist Ates Isildak, who
has just enough of a snarl to his delivery to drive home the real feeling in
the songs. The Band’s co-founder, keyboardist Lauren Dwyer, also handles her
share at the mic—her ethereal, practically child-like voice floating in to
trade off lines during refrains. While the whole “male/female vocal interplay”
thing is pretty standard of a band with shoegaze roots, but Dwyer and Isildak
are able to thrive here primarily because of where their vocal tracks stand in
the production layers—very untypical of a band with shoegaze roots, The Band in
Heaven have opted to make it so you CAN actually hear what your singers are
trying to say on Caught.
If you were to ask me to pick a high point, or a standout
moment on Caught in a Summer Swell,
I’d tell you, “the whole thing?” While the added strings on “Fairweather
Friends” makes it absolutely gorgeous, the horrible truths in “Farewell
Summer,” make it #realtalk, and the youthful fun you catch a glimmer at in
“Music Television,” are easy to all point at when pressed to the album is meant
to be taken as a whole. The ideas here can be picked apart, sure, but seeing
the bigger picture, and then seeing how it reflects within your own life, is a
revelation, and it’s something that albums are rarely capable of pulling off so
effortlessly.
While there’s a heck of a lot of talk about summer on this record (I mean, it’s
in the title and all) the middle/end of September is a perfect time to release
this. It didn’t really get above 60 degrees here today, and it’s currently
overcast and drizzling. The leaves started to turn weeks ago—the truth is
summer is over.
Fall, as I’ve learned, is not only a nostalgic time for me,
but for pretty much everyone. For some reason, I equate fall with a time of
reinvention—which is strange since spring is, you know, kind of that time in a
literal sense. But almost every “new” job I’ve taken has started in the fall.
Kids head back to school in the fall—and that makes me nostalgic for my college
days.
The bittersweet aspect of Caught in a Summer Swell is that you can yearn for nostalgia all
you want, but the harsh truths of adulthood are still there—I’m 30, I have a
mortgage, I’ve worked my fair share of soul crushing jobs, I’ve fallen out of
touch with nearly everyone I’ve ever befriended, and don’t get me going about
the horrible emptiness. Rarely am I able to identify almost completely with a
record. The Band in Heaven have outdone themselves right out of the gate with
something that speaks volumes to so many people, whether they are aware of it
yet or not.